Matter (within the bounds and constraints of space-time in the observable universe) and space itself has certain qualitative attributes—in the form of physical properties, broadly speaking—like …
Read more →
This post demonstrates how bs4’s BeautifulSoup can be deployed to scrape webpages. The example I’ve created here uses data on languages and language families from Ethnologue.com, a robust digital catalogue of typological information on the world’s languages.
Check out “Spin the Wheel”, the function …
Read more →
Mathematical notation: language. Stock market and finance jargon: language. Poetry: language.
That last one is obvious, but you may not have thought about math and stocks as being fundamentally linguistic. The language (i.e., words) used can still “correspond” to English1—or whatever your native language may be—but …
Read more →
It is interesting how much of our language is shaped by cultural mores and social institutions. “Social institutions” though, are of course made up of individuals, who each and together hold cultural values and personal biases.
The now-productive English prefix andro- was borrowed from the Greek andr- meaning “man” or …
Read more →
Want to learn how to be a Jinja ninja? (Since discovering Jinja I’ve wanted to use those words together in a sentence and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.)
The current post explains how you can use Jinja filters to access python functions and libraries from within …
Read more →
spaCy is a tool for natural language processing (NLP). It’s incredibly user-friendly and has several unique, useful features.
This tutorial covers the basics of spaCy, showing you how to install and get started, and then helping you to become familiar with some of the core concepts and …
Read more →
Some charts are confusing, some hard to interpret, and others are just boring, while still others (albeit a special, minority few) require that the rules of math and logic break in order to establish a reality in which they make sense. By manipulating data, not only is it …
Read more →
